Tagged: race

So Eve Ensler, most famous for writing The Vagina Monologues, wrote a thing, and I’m deliberately fudging the link and strongly advising you not to read it, especially as it deals with rape, surgery, and reducing a woman of colour to her vagina for the purposes of Ensler’s personal epiphany.

Chris Miller and Sarah Wilson have both done a fantastic job blogging on this story, so I thoroughly recommend reading what they have to say.

Recap: an Italian woman in Britain had a mental health issue. She was pregnant. The state, for reasons so far unknown, performed a C-section on her without her consent and put her child in care. This is approximately every level of fucked up.

But now, because more details have become clear, it sounds like a lot of progressive people think it’s not as big a deal, because it was doctors who made the decision to perform the C-section which has now led to this woman’s child potentially being permanently adopted without her consent.

I have a question.

What the fuck are you even doing?

Even the most able-bodied in-full-health no-medical-issues-ever progressive should be able to comprehend that doctors are not gods, and are not infallible, and are certainly capable of making fucked up decisions for fucked up reasons.

Like Dr Joseph Lee who refused to prescribe contraception to a young woman because “his conscience” told him to lecture her about The Duties Of Women instead.

Like the numerous doctors who refuse to perform basic diagnosis on patients who are fat. (Degenerative spine condition?

This isn’t an argument that all doctors are evil and none are to be trusted. Just as pointing out the utterly shitty culture the NZ Police have towards victims of sexual violence, especially sexual violence committed by members of the NZ Police, isn’t an argument that all police officers are rapists.

But frankly, enough of them are that you should not feel comfortable just assuming that doctors – or police officers – are acting with integrity. Especially when the person on the receiving end of their treatment has the black marks of mental illness, migrant status, and gender against her.

The people of the Elsipogtog First Nation have, for weeks, been standing in the way of a petrochemical company’s wish to frack their land. In both senses of the term. Fracking will fuck up their water supply and endanger their treaty-guaranteed rights to live of their land. They’ve protested peacefully. This week, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police sent in camo’d snipers.

And the “mainstream” media didn’t give much of a fuck until persons unknown set fire to RCMP cars. Which just handily provided an excuse to start making arrests.

This is a story which is played out all the time. It’s a story about global capitalist interests running roughshod over people who have been systematically fucked over for generations and who aren’t expected to be able to resist. They do. And we should – at the very least, from the other side of the world, where it’s hard to “do” anything to actually help – know about it.

Sorry, jumping ahead of myself. Here’s what Land Information New Zealand has to say about the alternative naming proposal:

The Board is seeking the public’s views on whether or not to formalise the names ‘North Island’ and ‘Te Ika-a-Māui’, and ‘South Island’ and ‘Te Waipounamu’, for the two main islands of New Zealand.

…

This means that, if the proposals are agreed, the existing English names and the Māori names for the islands will be able to be used officially, either individually or together. This also means they can be referred to as the ‘North Island’ or ‘Te Ika-a-Māui’, or the ‘South Island’ or ‘Te Waipounamu’ – or both names can be used together.

Spot the difference?

This issue has widely been discussed as though “North Island” and “South Island” have always been official – which they haven’t – and that the Māori names are “alternatives”. With the clear implication that they’re just an afterthought, a backup, a sop to the bleeding-heart liberals who probably aren’t even Māori anyway.

Both names are equally official and formalised, and have become so through this decision. Both names carry the same weight. Exactly as it should be.

But it’s not surprising we can’t discuss this properly. Elsewhere on LINZ’s FAQ you find this:

Everyone already knows the North and South Island names – why not just leave them as they are and forget about Māori names?

There is no legislation that formally assigns the names to the islands. The Board has a function to collect and encourage the use of original Māori place names.

It should also be noted that both the English and Māori names for these islands appeared on early maps up to the 1950s, following which – for reasons we are unable to ascertain – the Māori names were omitted. In fact Captain Cook only showed Māori names (with different spelling) on his charts of New Zealand.

It’s that time of year when whitey complains about the fact that New Zealand is home to a unique indigenous language, and the best efforts of past whiteys has failed to eliminate it, and now we actually dare to treat it like a valuable thing which should be promoted, all to mess with the minds of tiny white babies who will get confused if they’re told there’s more than one way to say “three”.

By which I mean to say, it’s Māori Language Week.

Linguist Nathan Albury has a column in the Dominion Post hoping that we’re going to get a proper Māori language strategy which keeps te reo alive. But that doesn’t let us individual Pākehā off the hook, people.

… and whenever you hear people bagging the promotion of te reo, or whinging that their children shouldn’t have to learn some Foreign Devil Tongue, remind them, using as many cusswords as you like, that te reo is unique to New Zealand, that it makes New Zealand English unique, that language learning does awesome things to your brain, and that it’s no more useless a bit of knowledge than all that fucking trigonometry we were forced to do at school.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this trial and how it “couldn’t” happen here. But it did. It did when Bruce Emery chased down Pihema Cameron and stabbed him to death over a tag on a fence. It did when you couldn’t move for people saying “oh well he was a vandal” and acting like Bruce Emery was justified in “being afraid” of the young man he pursued with a knife. When the conspiracy theory was that Pihema Cameron and his friend “lured” Emery into some kind of trap and forced him to start swinging a knife. When our ever-vocal “law and order” advocates excused Emery’s actions because getting graffiti off your fence is so frustrating.

This happened here, New Zealanders. And a white businessman served two years for killing a brown teenager. And we cannot let this shit happen.

Twitter was aflame over the weekend due to this article, detailing how pregnant, incarcerated, predominantly women of colour in California were coerced into being sterilised – for their own good, of course. To save them producing any more little brown burdens on the welfare system. Because they couldn’t be trusted to make their own reproductive decisions.

But amongst the completely understandable outrage, there was another reaction, from the women of colour who I follow: annoyance that white people got to once again clutch their pearls and decry how terrible racism is.

This is racist, of course, and for far deeper, scary, institutional reasons than just the basic facts – because of poverty, because of a judicial system geared against people of colour. That’s not the issue.

The issue is why white people like me get away with continually being surprised by this.

Let’s be fucking angry at this abuse. Let’s be frustrated at how long it’s taken to come to light. Let’s be utterly contemptuous of medical “professionals” who act like it’s no big thing to coerce vulnerable patients into making socially-acceptable medical decisions. Let’s be motivated into action.

But let’s not do that whole “OMG! How can this happen in this day and age?” thing.

Because that’s our privilege talking. Our existence as women-who-will-not-face-this-kind-of-pressure (yes, we’ll face plenty of other pressures, but if you’re a white, middle class, educated cis woman like me it’ll probably go in the complete opposite direction), women who do not deal with this kind of oppression as a fact of our daily lives.

We don’t really have the right to say “how can this happen in the 21st century?” because it’s never stopped for the people who experience it.

The few stories which make it into our awareness aren’t exceptions, except in the fact that they made it into our awareness at all.

Yes. That amazing life and liberty experienced by Mexican immigrants, documented or otherwise, who on crossing the border into the US are immediately welcomed with open arms, given all the rights and freedoms of white Americans, and not at all oppressed with racist, punitive legal systems and scary fucking vigilantes.

Or maybe they’re referring to Americans travelling south, and “life and liberty” is antichoice rhyming slang for tequila?

~

On a more serious note: gosh, it’s almost like NZ antichoicers have copied-and-pasted rhetoric from US antichoicers. That won’t end badly at all unless you’re a healthcare worker.

In shocking news today, the crew of the smash hit Discovery Channel show Mythbusters were arrested in Polk County, Florida, after over 200 hours of graphic video footage was seized by the Sheriff’s office.

A spokesman said, “We have a zero-tolerance approach to people using chemical reactions to learn more about the wonders of our physical universe. The Mythbusters’ interest in the rapid expansion of matter, sudden releases of chemical energy, and demonstrating the laws of physics using frozen chickens poses a clear and present threat to the citizens of Polk County.”

~

Except of course that’s not what happened. What happened was a sixteen-year-old high school student mixed some stuff together in a water bottle to see what would happen. As hundreds of thousands of sixteen-year-old high school students have done over the course of centuries – that is, those who didn’t tire of such childish things and graduate to making their own fireworks or pipe bombs, or throwing handfuls of potassium into the school pool.

(Best. Chemistry class. EVER.)

But this time, when there was a “pop” and the top came off the water bottle, Kiera Wilmot was expelled and arrested on felony weapons charges.

Kiera Wilmot just happens to be a young woman of colour, unlike 90% of the people you see on YouTube making things go “pop” in a similar fashion.

In a recent speech to Grey Power, Winston was back to his old tricks, threatening Grey Power that The Yellow Peril is coming for their superannuation cheques (I have merged a lot of the paragraphs together because it was waaaaaaay long):

You will hear the media scream about xenophobia because we mention China but China’s domestic policies have a huge effect on this country. Here is why.

When an immigrant from India or the UK comes to New Zealand, any application they might make for family reunification is treated identically.

But with China, for the most obvious reason, it is different. Say we get one immigrant from China. Say he comes with his wife and child. China has had a one child policy for decades. What does this mean?

It’s clear as daylight, isn’t it. If you’ve only got one child, and that child becomes an immigrant to New Zealand, he can bring his parents and his wife can bring her parents. So we get the wife, child and four parents all from one immigrant under the ‘centre of gravity’ policy.

People are telling me that they think it’s wrong, that it’s not fair, and it’s unfair to the New Zealand taxpayer and the remaining immigrant community. Even Chinese journalists and academics have referred to this as being wrong.

Fifty per cent of healthcare spending and resources in New Zealand are on people aged over 65 years. The waiting lists for elective surgery are getting longer and longer. So any artificial spike in the numbers affects everyone. The biggest hits are on New Zealand Superannuation.

On our figures, there are tens of thousands of immigrants who have acquired Superannuation this way. Instead of addressing these anomalies, there’s talk of raising the age and means testing.

The problem is who we are giving Superannuation to. A migrant only has to be resident for 10 years, and from age 65, they are entitled to full New Zealand Super without any prior requirement to work.

The media may also “scream xenophobia” because it is kind of xenophobic to single out elderly Chinese migrants for exclusion from superannuation.

But as far as I can tell, the media hasn’t given a fuck about Winston yet again trying to stir up populist racism. So I just thought I’d put it out there in case his utterly obnoxious performance during the marriage equality debate wasn’t enough of a reminder that he’s a disingenuous shitheel who will say and do whatever it takes to get 5% of the population to vote him and a few of his peons back into Parliament.

What a pity he won’t be one of the panellists on The Vote’s upcoming debate on “Is New Zealand a racist country?” though. It would be the only thing which could make that utter farce any more of a must-not-watch.